Abstract
Worldviews that give us meaning need to be more than cognitive maps of the world. They need to generate a sense about why life is worth living, and to do so they must tell us what the ends of life are. Such basic values are what we experience as sacred. Without such an experience of the sacred, no worldview can provide the existential mooring that we humans need. Could there be a sacred principle common to most members of Homo globalis that could help us deepen our experience of meaning?
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Notes
This charge has been formulated within the American context in Lasch, C. (1995). The revolt of the elites and the betrayal of democracy. New York, NY: Norton. It is at the foundation of Naomi Klein’s scathing indictment of the tactics of multinational corporations and neoliberal economic policies.
Klein, N. (2000). No logo. London, UK: Picador
see also Klein, N. (2008). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. London, UK: Picador.
The point that globalization has led to the point where there is no longer an outsider has been argued in detail by Sloterdijk, P. (2005). Im weltinnenraum des kapitals. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Dennett and Dawkins bring home this case tirelessly in Dennett, D. C. (2005). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. New York, NY: Viking
Dawkins, R. (2006). The God delusion. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.
Since my point here is the inevitability of disdain and the necessity to manage it within civilized bounds, I will not go into the deeper intricacies of the philosophy of religion. See Eagleton, T. (2009). Reason, faith, and revolution: Reflections on the God debate. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. In particular I believe that civilized disdain does not preclude an appreciation of the coherence and, in many cases, the beauty of forms of religious life. Paul Berman, while seeing Islamic fundamentalism as one of the great dangers of our times, succeeds admirably well in showing the beauty of the position and even the seductiveness of Sayyid al-Qutb, the great theorist of Sunni political Islam.
See Berman, P. (2003). Terror and liberalism. New York, NY: Norton.
Amartya Sen has brought home this point persuasively with reference to the complex cultural divides in India: Sen, A. (2005). The argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian history, culture, and identity. London, UK: Picador.
This is the core argument of Robert Wright in Wright, R. (2009). The evolution of God. New York, NY: Little Brown. Wright’s earlier ideas will play an important role in this chapter.
An interesting attempt to formulate some of the bridges for communication has been presented in Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. New York, NY: Norton. While his prescription of widening the moral imagination is certainly valid, I feel that his tireless insistence on respecting worldviews other than ours at times borders on the political correctness that I criticized in chapter 8.
See Durkheim, E. (1915). The elementary forms of religious life. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Durkheim, E. (1915). The elementary forms of religious life. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
See Wright, R. (2000). Nonzero: The logic of human destiny. New York, NY: Pantheon.
These developments are fully explained in Wright, R. (1994). The moral animal. New York, NY: Pantheon.
For an encompassing interpretation of the wars of the twentieth century from a different vantage point, see Ferguson, N. (2006). The war of the world. New York, NY: Penguin.
Berlin, I. (1958). Two concepts of liberty. In Four essays on liberty (p. 167). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Berlin, I. (1958). Two concepts of liberty. In Four essays on liberty (pp. 118–172). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Berlin, I. (1958). Two concepts of liberty. In Four essays on liberty (p. 167). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Berlin, I. (1958). Two concepts of liberty. In Four essays on liberty (p. 172). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Atran, S. (2010). Talking to the enemy: Violent extremism, sacred values and what it means to be human. New York, NY: Ecco.
See Lovelock, J. (2005). Gaia: And the theory of the living planet. New York, NY: Gaia Publications.
See Lovelock, J. (2007). The revenge of Gaia: Earth’s climate crisis & the fate of humanity. New York, NY: Basic Books.
See Gray, J. (2007). Black mass: Apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
See Wright, R. (2000). Nonzero: The logic of human destiny. New York, NY: Pantheon; see also TED talks Director. (2008, April 15). Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict. YouTube. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcZFIy2mfyE&feature=related for a lively and often humorous exposition by Wright of the nonzero principle. Nobel Prize laureate Ilya Prigogine, from a different vantage point, has put forth a similar argument; see Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature. New York, NY: Bantam.
See Castells, M. (2000). The Internet galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, business, and society. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
See Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How human societies choose to fail or survive. New York, NY: Viking.
Freud, S. (1927–1931). The future of an illusion. In J. Stratchey (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 21 (1927–1931): The future of an illusion, civilization and its discontents, and other works. London, UK: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis.
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© 2011 Carlo Strenger
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Strenger, C. (2011). Toward World Citizenship and a Coalition of Open Worldviews. In: The Fear of Insignificance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117662_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117662_10
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